Following the Footprints
Medical checks, unfamiliar offices and the unsettling business of handing over my passport.
Yang, who helped with EF’s visa arrangements, appeared in my WeChat contacts. I had set aside a day off for the next stage of my immigration paperwork.
By then, I had already been through a medical examination in Shanghai with the other recruits.
The process felt remarkably systematic. Wearing a gown, I followed footprints on the floor from one station to the next. There were roughly eight stops, and the whole thing took about forty minutes.
I remember a chest X-ray, blood-pressure and eyesight checks, someone examining my stomach, and a blood test. A form accumulated ticks while I tried to understand what was happening.
The blood test was the part I dreaded. I had fainted during previous tests, and needles were not something moving abroad had suddenly made me brave about.
This time, I concentrated on getting through it without fainting. There were enough unfamiliar things to deal with already.
The resulting paperwork went to Yang. It was in Chinese, so I couldn’t read it. I assumed that if there were a problem, someone would tell me.
We met at the centre and took a taxi to an official-looking building. After walking through several corridors and speaking to a woman there, Yang called another taxi.
Apparently, we needed to be somewhere else.
Another long ride later, we arrived at a building with uniformed officers. We took a number and waited.
When our turn came, I approached the counter with Yang.
‘Hello,’ I said, smiling.
The officer smiled and said hello back.
It was a tiny exchange, but after feeling so uncertain during my application in Manchester, I appreciated it. Official buildings were less intimidating when someone smiled.
I handed over my passport with the documents. As I understood it, Yang would return it once the paperwork was complete, in about a month.
A month felt like a long time to be without it.
Until then, my passport had been the thing that meant I could leave if I needed to. Giving it to someone else made me feel unexpectedly trapped, even though nothing had happened to make me want to go home.
I was given a receipt and told there were arrangements for travelling while the application was being processed. I didn’t fully understand the details; I mostly wanted reassurance that I wasn’t stuck.
At that stage, so much depended on trusting people who understood a system I couldn’t yet navigate myself.
In later years, appointments like this would become part of my routine. But that first time, even leaving an office without my passport felt like another lesson in living somewhere unfamiliar.